A consequence management model for local government in South Africa
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Date
2024-11
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University of Fort Hare
Abstract
In the quest to execute their constitutional mandate to provide and render services to citizens and communities, South African municipalities are required to attain and achieve financial accountability. Achieving and attaining standards of good financial governance has been a mammoth task for most municipalities in South Africa. The challenge has been attributed to financial mismanagement, funds misappropriation and the incapacity to execute legislative frameworks. Municipalities have been unable to take stringent actions against officials/ operatives who transgress law and misuse municipal financial resources. Consequently, present study explores the meaning and practices of Consequence Management to determine possible strategies and measures to enforce the practice of good financial governance within municipalities. Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality (BCMM) was selected as context; the sample consisted of employees from Budget and Treasury, Corporate Services and Infrastructure and Town Planning; Political Structures which comprise of (Council, Mayoral Committees, the Portfolio Committees and Municipal Public Accounts Committee). COSO Enterprise Risk Management Framework 2017 (ERM), Reinforcement Theory (RT), and Contingency Theory of Ethics (CTE) were adopted to frame Consequence Management. The adoption necessitated a two-phased Sequential Explanatory Mixed Method (SEMM), supported by pragmatism philosophy application. An exploratory case study design permitted this research to examine multiple aspects as it relates to practices of Consequence Management in the South African local government system. In the quantitative phase, questionnaire data sourced from 223 municipal employees was analysed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) through the AMOS (version 29) to identify critical elements that describe Consequence Management. Analysis was followed by the qualitative phase where 13 interview transcripts were selected from the sample of quantitative phase. The qualitative data was generated by transcribing into text audio clips and were analysed with content analysis through python (Version 3.12), to understand the quantitative phase results. Findings of this study shed light and revealed that while Consequence Management exists in municipalities, it is presented neither without structure, nor a willingness to implement its very basic components from risk management to employee performance management. Municipalities seem to be subsumed with political tensions where the pull between political structures and administrative process mostly favours politically designed motives and not administrative-due processes. As a response to the narrated debilitating state of municipal financial governance – present study presumably contributes by providing a consequence management model to enhance the ability of municipalities to ensure effective and efficient implementation of regulatory frameworks.
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Keywords
Municipal finance, Finance, Public -- South Africa, Public administration